the enchantment of irony - melanie roger gallery...irony that aims to shift the reader’s awareness...
TRANSCRIPT
9
The Enchantment of Irony
works by Liyen Chong
essay by Kriselle Baker
list of works
New Zealand History
Applied and Decorative Arts
Ethnology
Pictorial Collections
Marine
Botany
Entomology
Land Vertebrates
Archaeology
1. Hero
2. A Bowl to Catch the Sun
3. Empire
4. Magritte’s Hat
5. Sky chart: 1730hrs, 1 July 2008, 42°31’59” S, 172°37’58” E
6. Hedge Maze
7. The Cockroach
8. Ouroboros
9. 1:1 scale of the ‘pyramid’ on the reverse of the United States one-dollar bill
HUMAN HISTORY : New Zealand History
1. Hero Portrait of Sir Edmund Hillary on a NZ 5 Dollar Note
In the early morning of Sir Ed’s funeral, 22 January 2008, I dreamt I was in a ‘chapel’ just before the service was about to start. My dog Babushka was there with me though after a while, she disappeared. There was a huge blue swimming pool in the centre of the ‘chapel’. For some reason I was left alone with the casket and then suddenly there was a lot of running around. Other people whom I did not know randomly appeared in my dream conscious-ness. While in my dream, I realised the service was about to take place some-where else and I had to carry the casket. I can’t remember much else after that.
I think it is strange that although I am not acquainted with the Holy Trinity Cathedral and its surrounds, I dreamt of the existence of a ‘chapel’ next to it. I
later learnt of St Mary’s Church, which is very near the Holy Trinity Cathedral.
Notes: Collective Consciousness. Travelling like a dream through history.
HUMAN HISTORY : Applied and Decorative Arts
2. A Bowl to Catch the Sun hair from a stranger
Notes: Candy Text. My hairline cracks at the site of you. private Laughings
who
se
hair
s st
ood
on
end.
HUMAN HISTORY : Ethnology
3. Empire from the New Zealand Coat of Arms
Chart the courses of empires that last a thousand years.
Notes: Castration. Conspiracy. The diasporic vagrant child speaksX
PICTORIAL COLLECTIONS :
4. Memory of Hat a.k.a. Magritte’s Hat
He sat up last night in a fright. He thought he was about to die, but strangely enough, if he was actually dreaming he was already dead and in heaven, it wouldn’t have stressed him out that much.
Notes: Conceptual versus Continual Deaths.
NATURAL HISTORY : New Zealand History
5. Sky Chart 5.30pm, 1 July 2008, 42°31’59” S, 172°37’58” E
AEDH WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. YEATS (1899)
Notes: Christchurch. Now Time Past. What you are seeing in the sky now already hap-
pened thousands of years ago as the lights from those stars now reach us. Imagined Space ~
locate your ache.
NATURAL HISTORY : Botany
6. Hedge Maze Landscape Architecture
This work is based on the maze at Chevening House, England, which was the first maze to have been designed using mathematical principles and is a ‘multiple connected maze’ which means that it has infinite loops and many dead ends. It cannot be solved by the ‘left hand rule’, i.e. running your left hand along the hedge until you find your goal.
1
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Edward Bond, as quoted by Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses.
Notes: Desire. Control. She runs alone in a maze. (Scene from Orlando by Sally Potter)
NATURAL HISTORY : Entomology
7. The Cockroach Order Blattaria
Cockroaches are known to be able to withstand radiation from nuclear explosions. As a species, humans will probably die out before cockroaches do. The luck of evolution is on their side, not ours.
It is interesting to think that time won’t end when all human consciousness
finally ends.
Notes: None.
NATURAL HISTORY : Land Vertebrates
8. Ouroboros Ourorboros, Oroborus, Uroboros or Uroborus
“…it is said of the ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, ferti-lises himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolises the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites.”
Carl Jung
Notes: Consumption. The Taxonomy of Love and Illusion.
Irony is dead! Long live irony! - David
Beers, September 25, 2001
HUMAN HISTORY : Archaeology
9. 1:1 scale of the ‘pyramid’ on the reverse of the United States one-dollar bill
Irony is dead! Long live irony!
David Beers, September 25, 2001
1
Google Ad found when a search for
‘state of the US Dollar’ was performed
(14th June 2008):
United States Dollar
Hear What Our Experts Say About
The Dollar’s Decline - FREE Report.
www.WorldCurrencyWatch.com
Notes: Contradiction embracing irony.
“What kind of an idea are you?” the Jewel Bedecked Dragon asked? 2006, artist’s hair embroidered on
cotton, 34 x 82mm, private collection.
•
The Enchantment of Irony
It is in the world of dreams that irony’s unhappy love finds its object. Søren Kierkegaard
There is an underlying instability inherent in the notion of irony. It is
a device of language that acknowledges the gap between what is
expected and what is seen and between the world of dreams and the
world of reality. The dislocation of irony interwoven with the concept
of attachment forms the theme of Liyen Chong’s current work. These
are images that make apparent a desire to engage with the complexity of
language as much as with the art object.
There are in essence two sorts of irony: a modern satirical irony that
attacks the conventions of a context (by saying the opposite of what
is meant in order to expose an underlying truth), and a Romantic
irony that aims to shift the reader’s awareness beyond a given context.
Romantic irony is often the more evocative of the two – it is the irony
of the great Romantic poets such as William Blake and Samuel
Coleridge – and is closely associated with the German philosopher
Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel wrote of divided perspectives in which the
author simultaneously occupies a dual position within and parallel to
the narrative. Both these types of irony filter through Chong’s imagery
creating uncertainty and disequilibrium in works that prick at our
consciousness, interrogating our perception of the world and of others.
one
In Cai Xueqin’s eighteenth-century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber
(Hung Lou Meng – a euphemism for the secluded mansions that once
housed the daughters of China’s aristocracy) the love story that winds
through this long episodic tale begins in a supernatural realm and then
progresses seamlessly through to a real world of closely observed detail
and emotional nuance. As the narrative and the characters move between
these two worlds it is this duality of being ‘both within and without the
illusion’ that signals the beginning of irony. 1
In Chong’s earlier work, the installation and online project A Humid
Day (2007), the Romantic irony that underscores the narrative structure
of The Dream of the Red Chamber is translated into material form as the
text on the packaging of commodities used in the course of an ordinary
day. This is altered to reveal the schizophrenic reality of the protagonist:
a character of uncertain origin who ‘lives by herself among strangers in a
land where she was not born…She is sometimes not sure which world,
or set of laws she is living by.’2 As she negotiates her way through an
unfamiliar culture, the fragmented reality of the character is ordered into
layers of meaning based on the increasing levels of abstraction in Roget’s
Thesaurus, and her state of mind charted according to the multiple stages
of psychological development so that the altered syntax of a gift voucher
reads: ‘To the value of uncertainty…because we know how certainty
crumbles in your hand.’
1. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p.139.
2. http://www.ahumidday.info
two
‘Under the aegis of Romanticism faith in the capacity of the mind to
create other worlds is said to be matched by fear of delusion’.3 That fear
or incomprehension permeates the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s
recounting of a dream in which he imagines he is a butterfly. When
awoken he finds himself a person again but he now does not know if he
is a man who dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams of
being a man. This story is retold in two elaborate and fragile images of a
butterfly that Chong has embroidered in delicate, tendrils and arabesques
of line. The titles of the work pose the questions: Am I a woman who
dreamt I was a butterfly? or Am I a butterfly who dreams I am a woman?
Which of these worlds is our reality, they ask, and which the illusion?
Many of Chong’s images, like the butterflies, are finely embroidered
works of hair on cotton exquisitely rendered in painstaking detail. The
process for the artist is meditative and exacting, with the individual works
requiring more than 30 hours of close concentration with some extending
to over 100 hours. These images seem more like elegant line-drawings
or intaglio prints than embroidery, with their smooth, velvety blacks
like that of drypoint and the crisp linear details like the precise lines of
etching. They are works of such highly refined artifice and complexity
that as a viewer one feels compelled to look at the back in order to take
in the extraordinary skill of the artist. That level of skill and the attention
lavished on the work creates a strong sense of attachment or enchantment
with the work as a coveted, irreproducible object of rare beauty.
3. Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, p.259.
three
The technique of embroidery creates its own form of associations and
attachment for Chong. It was a skill learned within the family. Taught by
a mother and paternal grandmother, it carries the memory of a Malaysian
childhood and a nostalgia for the familiar symbols of culture – the
traditional Chinese emblems of lions and dragons that in earlier work are
assigned lyric titles questioning the singular understanding of cultural
context: “What kind of an idea are you?” the Jewel Bedecked Dragon asked
(2006).
Whereas once the artist used her own hair, more recently it is the hair of
friends and acquaintances, and in one case, a stranger. Using a person’s
hair to create an artwork elicits an extraordinary sense of intimacy.
Hair that is silken and fine can be lovely but hair is also associated with
darker meanings. There are the rooms full of hair that are poignant
and distressing reminders of the Holocaust. In Chinese literature, the
long unkempt hair of women is often associated with madness, the
otherworldliness of ghost stories, and young women committing suicide
in moments of inconsolable grief. The embroidered images are weighted
with this accumulation of meaning.
In this current exhibition, Chong has used the taxonomy of the
museum to structure and clarify, and to create a sense of order. Each
image is positioned within a different classification system (History,
Applied and Decorative Arts, Ethnology, Pictorial Collections, Marine,
Botany, Entomology, Land Vertebrates and Archaeology). These
systems encompass a specific context or way of looking at the world of
categorising, naming, and assigning significance.
four
How we might understand the images within the codes of that
classification, and our attachment to them within the function of the
museum, is undermined by a competing reality. The irony of that reality
reorientates our understanding of the image so that a St Edward’s Crown
located within the discipline of Ethnology and embroidered with the
hair of Asian and Polynesian friends takes on a new layer of meaning.
The material reality of the work shifts our perceptions away from an
entrenched cultural geography that in a colonial context positioned
Britain at the centre, marginalizing other cultures. Our understanding
of this most Euro-centric of symbols is now infused with a competing
reality.
These works are also, in their individual way, a small memorial to the
idea of death. They mark not only the physical death of the body but the
mortality of ideas. Take, for example, Sir Edmund Hillary immortalised
on a New Zealand five dollar note – a hero that following his death and
within the context of the museum might be assigned to the category of
History and yet he remains part of the currency of our everyday lives.
This work is also tinged with a humorous, satirical irony in what in one
sense might be considered the absurdity of ascribing an insignificant
value to our most revered public figure.
Then there is the uncertain ‘death of irony’ following the events of
September 11th. The division of the world into good and evil, which
would make redundant the need to seek truth through irony, was soon
shown to be a fallacy. The Eye of Providence depicted here, and that is
included in the Great Seal of the United States and the dollar bill, cannot
Wve
then in absolute certainty be used, as intended, as a seal of authenticity
and truth in a world in which those concepts remain unclear.
These works are exquisite objects – the embroidery is as captivating and
ingenious as the perfectly re-visualised packaging of A Humid Day.
They are though deceptively refined and ordered images they do not
hold to a single truth or idea. Our enchantment and understanding
of the image is constantly displaced by the layers of meaning revealed
through the unfolding nuances of irony. The moment when we perceive
the irony within the object – when our understanding of the significance
of the object is altered – that is the moment of disenchantment. As each
successive layer of meaning forms within our consciousness it expresses
something different about the nature of our attachment to the material
world.
Kriselle Baker
six
Am I a woman who dreamt I was a butterfly 2007, artist’s hair embroidered on cotton, 55 x 37 mm, private collection.
Am I a butterfly who dreams I am a woman? 2007, artist’s hair embroidered on cotton, 55 x 37 mm, private collection.
•
9 is the highest single digit number in a world that has accepted the base ten numeral system.
9 being equal to 321, is an exponential factorial.
The number 9 is considered a lucky number in Chinese culture because it sounds exactly the same as the word “longlasting”in Chinese.
9 is strongly associated with the Chinese dragon, a symbol of power in the Chinese culture. The dragon has nine attributes and nine forms, and the number of its scales has a factor of 9.
1
Liyen Chong graduated with a BFA in Painting (2001) and a MFA in Design (2003) from the University of Canterbury. She is currently based in Auckland.
Liyen Chong was born in Malaysia on the 9th of May, 1979.
www.liyenchong.com